Intel has commissioned Principled Technologies to run benchmarks of the upcoming i9-9900K CPU and pit it against older Intel CPUs and some AMD CPUs such as the AMD Ryzen 2700X, Threadripper 2990WX, and Threadripper 2950X. PCGamesN wrote a glowing article that has since been heavily edited, about how Intel's new chip was up to 50% faster than AMD's best. Reading over the original PCGamesN article you would have thought that sliced bread had just been invented and Intel was delivering us from the Dark Ages. To PCGamesN's credit they did run this article acknowledging that Hardware Unboxed found bias in the benchmarks, but they still have the flawed and biased Principled Technologies charts showcased on their website for all to see.

Hardware Unboxed did a short analysis of a few of the benchmarks as their team felt that the i7-8700K benchmarks and the AMD Ryzen 2700X numbers were incorrect. They found that Principled Technologies had allegedly gimped the AMD CPUs by using different coolers, incorrect ram timings, and possibly even disabled some of the cores on the AMD Ryzen 2700X. To put this into perspective, on the Ashes of the Singularity benchmark that Hardware Unboxed ran, the AMD Ryzen 2700X was 18% faster and the i7-8700K was 4% slower, than the commissioned testing that Intel has published. They even showed how over a suite of games that the i7-8700K was only 9% faster than the AMD Ryzen 2700X in previous pure gaming benchmarks conducted by Hardware Unboxed. Yet in Intel's commissioned benchmark results, the AMD Ryzen 2700X was far, far, behind the Intel i7-8700K in performance metrics. This is why we never trust a manufacturer's benchmarks. Always wait for the review before buying hardware.

"Why is PCGamesN publishing this misleading data? Why aren't they tearing this obviously paid report; because they're very transparent that this is a paid report commissioned by Intel, why aren't they tearing it to shreds? Do they simply not know any better? I'm a bit worried or wondering if we might see other websites covering this report; perhaps paid to cover it. And I'm not accusing or saying that PCGamesN were paid by Intel. Doesn't look great and I suppose the very least it is very shoddy journalism."

I agree with cageymaru that we should never trust any manufacturer's benchmarks, or those where money has traded hands to a third party as in this case.

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Exactly.....but this only helps those who are at least moderately informed (and I hope the vast majority of us here are in that category). This kind of craptastic reporting, misleading benchmarking, and manufacturer self-gratification preys on the weak.

Be the first to throw out a "we're so much better" headline, and the uninformed masses fall for it; leaving the subsequent headlines to try and play damage control.

I'm not so sure about that. Manufacturers giving false impressions in their marketing graphs is nothing new, everybody does that. But they are often very vague what they were testing against on purpose because it is AFAIK illegal in many places to give pure false information about your competitions product. IE in hypothetical situstion if Nvidia were claiming that their new GTX9001 does 500fps in game X while at the same time claiming AMD HD9000 does only 100fps while in reality it does 450fps Nvidia would get sued on the spot. I do not remember AMD doing this (correct me if I am wrong) but Intel is doing this right now and only reason they get around lawsuits is because its a 3rd party doing the "testing". Plausible deniablity and all that.

Regardless of how fast this chip is; it still has No internal mitigations of all the various attacks, and with the microcode and software mitigations for those problems, will be 20-40% slower than without them.

The benchmarks carried out by Principled Technologies are even more bogus than we first thought. A few viewers pointed out that the Ryzen 7 2700X was listed as tested in the “Game Mode” within the Ryzen Master software and I foolishly thought they might have just made a simple copy and paste error in their document as they would have used this mode for the 2950X. This does explain why the Threadripper CPUs were faster than the 2700X in every test.

What this means is a CCX module in the 2700X was completely disabled, essentially turning it into a quad-core. I’ve gone ahead and re-run the XMP 2933 test with Game Mode enabled and now I’m getting results that are within the margin of error to those published by Principled Technologies.

Why doesn't PCGamesN throw these tests away? Short answer, capitalism. Long answer, nobody knows who PCGamesN is so getting paid by Intel compensates for the lack of people visiting their site. Benchmark tests are very manipulative as shown by AdoredTV, so every website seems to have different results.

A paid review is a influenced review. Even if its not directly influenced you will subconsciously moderate yourself so as to not bite the hand(s) that feed you. Some exceptions do apply for cranky old guys

I'm not so sure about that. Manufacturers giving false impressions in their marketing graphs is nothing new, everybody does that. But they are often very vague what they were testing against on purpose because it is AFAIK illegal in many places to give pure false information about your competitions product. IE in hypothetical situstion if Nvidia were claiming that their new GTX9001 does 500fps in game X while at the same time claiming AMD HD9000 does only 100fps while in reality it does 450fps Nvidia would get sued on the spot. I do not remember AMD doing this (correct me if I am wrong) but Intel is doing this right now and only reason they get around lawsuits is because its a 3rd party doing the "testing". Plausible deniablity and all that.

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typically it's just fudging the graphs so that 10% looks more like 50% in a normal graph.. even though i'm not an intel fan i can't possibly see this being 100% intentional by intel.. this feels more like complete and utter incompetence by PCgamesN.. cough like the 2000 dollar computer being built by some one that's never used anything other than apple products...

typically it's just fudging the graphs so that 10% looks more like 50% in a normal graph.. even though i'm not an intel fan i can't possibly see this being 100% intentional by intel.. this feels more like complete and utter incompetence by PCgamesN.. cough like the 2000 dollar computer being built by some one that's never used anything other than apple products...

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True. You can make a mountain out of a mole hill if you zoom in close enough, but that is what I was referring to when I mentioned "false impression". But as long as the numbers themselves are accurate and no number was intentionally gimped then that is okay, it is up to the viewer to keep their eyes open and understand what they are seeing correctly. The zoomed in graph is technically still not a lie.

If the PCgamesN test came from Intel or not is impossible to tell unless someone leaks a paycheck or email. Plausible deniability, Intel can play dumb and nobody can prove a thing.

Holy crap, maybe I gave Intel too much credit for the "plausible deniability" thing, because Forbes also covered this debacle and Intel PR rep actually contacted them and had balls to claim that the tests were "correct" and in spec? WTF!?

“We are deeply appreciative of the work of the reviewer community and expect that over the coming weeks additional testing will continue to show that the 9th Gen Intel Core i9-9900K is the world’s best gaming processor. Principled Technologies conducted this initial testing using systems running in spec, configured to show CPU performance and has published the configurations used. The data is consistent with what we have seen in our labs, and we look forward to seeing the results from additional third party testing in the coming weeks.”

Holy crap, maybe I gave Intel too much credit for the "plausible deniability" thing, because Forbes also covered this debacle and Intel PR rep actually contacted them and had balls to claim that the tests were "correct" and in spec? WTF!?

Holy crap, maybe I gave Intel too much credit for the "plausible deniability" thing, because Forbes also covered this debacle and Intel PR rep actually contacted them and had balls to claim that the tests were "correct" and in spec? WTF!?

What this means is that Intel has given the testers some 'recommended settings' to replicate their in-house results. The blame appears to lie squarely with Intel here. The fact that Intel is claiming 50% better performance than the 2700X suggests that this is no mistake.

Surely blatant misrepresentation like this must be a sue-able offense.

AMD does the same thing. I agree with cageymaru that we should never trust any manufacturer's benchmarks, or those where money has traded hands to a third party as in this case.

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I agree with you and looks like many others, then you look at some of their posts and you see them defending a manufactures benchmarks as fact. You can look at the Nvidia launch and see some do just that, thus why we need places like the [H] to show us the truth in the performance to expect. Always understand that a manufacturer is always going to show their new product in the best light possible. A paid third party site is really almost never a good source for solid info on a new product. Independent news is more important then most think and usually pretty close to what you should expect if you buy it.

Holy crap, maybe I gave Intel too much credit for the "plausible deniability" thing, because Forbes also covered this debacle and Intel PR rep actually contacted them and had balls to claim that the tests were "correct" and in spec? WTF!?

Yeah, and I have a nicely modded 8700k, but when right now today using Amazon and Newegg as examples a 2700x is $299 on Amazon and the 9900k is $579 on Newegg...

"Houston we have a marketing problem!"

If they can't somehow claim it's around 50% faster that price tag is nearly impossible to swallow.

And it doesn't help that the 9900k is essentially the successor to the 8700k whether or not Intel calls it an "i9". The removal of the HT from the 9700k makes it more of an oddity than a comparable product. It's an "i5+" by any enthusiast's measure. It takes time to shift the specs of an entire product space and make people ok with it.

But we’ve done our own digging into the story and from what we’ve uncovered the truth of the matter is the transparency Nvidia are chasing is about making it clear which graphics card range from a company is based on GeForce tech and which are running AMD’s GPUs. It’s not about stopping a company from having a separate AMD-based gaming brand.